Alternative Music

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of RUSH recently sat down for an interview in Toronto for “House Of Strombo”, a free-form radio talk program hosted by Canadian television and radio personality George Stroumboulopoulos. In this exclusive conversation, Lee and Lifeson talked about the 40th anniversary of their eighth studio album “Moving Pictures”, the loss of RUSH drummer Neil Peart, grieving in public, their new perspective on time, the music industry today, being booed off stage, getting high before rehearsals, Taylor Hawkins and more. Reflecting on how he processed the fact that he would never play with RUSH again after the completion of the “R40” tour, which commemorated the 40th anniversary of Peart joining the band, Geddy said (as transcribed by BLABBERM...

Dutch powerhouse singer Floor Jansen performed her new solo single, “Fire”, live for the first time on Sunday, April 17 at the Paaspop festival at Manegeclub De Molenheide in Schijndel, Netherlands. Fan-filmed video of the concert can be seen below. “Fire” was made available on March 25 via ADA, the division of Warner Music Group dedicated to independent label and artist distribution. Jansen is best known as the frontwoman in the multi-million selling and internationally successful symphonic metal band NIGHTWISH. As part of the band, Jansen has landed two number one albums in Finland, and Top Five albums in Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Born in the Netherlands, Jansen joined her first band, one of the wor...

TRIUMPH drummer Gil Moore spoke to “The Hook Rocks” podcast about the band’s documentary, “Triumph: Rock & Roll Machine”, which recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and is now available for streaming in Canada. Asked what it felt like seeing the documentary for the first time and having the band’s story told through someone else’s perspective, Gil said: “The film, I think, was so well shot and well directed and well scripted that it has a narrative where I’m looking at it almost looking in through the looking glass going, ‘Gee, that’s the story.’ And I was there, but I was too close to the story. And when I actually watch the film, it’s like being a passenger on the bus and not drivin...

In a new interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett was asked about his decision to enlist Canadian producer Bob Rock, who has been responsible for some of the biggest rock and metal albums of the last 30 years, including all of METALLICA‘s studio output during the 1990s and early 2000s, to mix his debut solo EP, “Portals”. “When it came time to get the stuff together, it was last summer,” Hammett, who lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, said. Most of the stuff was recorded. But I still needed to do a few guitar parts here and there to add to the songs. All of it needed to be mixed. The four tracks needed to be mixed and I thought, ‘How am I going to do this?’ You know, I can’t really travel to the mainland and do all of th...

Black metal pioneers VENOM performed at this year’s Inferno festival on Thursday, April 14 at Rockefeller in Oslo, Norway. Fan-filmed video of the concert can be seen below (courtesy of YouTube channel Mo blackmetalbitch). VENOM formed in 1979 in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Coming to prominence towards the end of the new wave of British heavy metal, VENOM‘s first two albums — “Welcome To Hell” (1981) and “Black Metal” (1982) — are considered a major influence on thrash metal and extreme metal in general. VENOM‘s second album proved influential enough that its title was used as the name of the extreme metal sub-genre of black metal. The band classic lineup trio of Conrad “Cronos” Lant, Jeff “Mantas” Dunn and Anthony “Abaddon&#...

What distinguishes Axel Boman’s music from other house music may be obvious to the ears, but it can be hard to put your finger on. The Stockholm producer avails himself of the same materials as many of his peers in the European dance underground—spongy synth bass, sharp-edged drum hits, filtered disco samples—but even when hewing to convention, Boman’s bouncy, brightly colored tracks stand out as though sprinkled with fairy dust. His productions are a little cartoonish, a little dreamlike, a little off-kilter. Like his occasional labelmate DJ Koze, Boman knows that there’s a fine line between a knee-slapper and a tearjerker: His music harbors both a sly sense of humor and an unmistakable melancholy, and the former often feels like a coping strategy for the latter. In the nine years since h...

Last night (Saturday, April 16), Canadian singer, songwriter and producer Devin Townsend played the first of two shows at London, England’s prestigious Royal Albert Hall. The two dates, which are part of Townsend‘s European tour, were being promoted as “The Greatest Sets Of My Life”, with Devin previously promising to play “my favorites, your favorites and a bunch of hardly played songs.” Earlier this week, Devin told Stereoboard about the Royal Albert gigs: “The idea of the Royal Albert Hall shows is to play a huge parcel of my catalogue in the best way that I possibly can. I want to get back out there and really play this music in a way where I can say, ‘Listen, ladies and gentlemen, this is how it’s supposed to sound. This is how I w...